Fabio Capello. I like him. He seems like my kind of guy. The whole thing where he asked Ronaldo, in the shower after a Real Madrid game, with all the rest of the team watching, if he was not ashamed of being so fat...priceless. You cannot put a price on that. Or can you? Well it turns out you can. Beware, it's a bit steep. £8,500,000 annually. £708,333 monthly. £170,000 weekly. £34,000 for just one day. Yep, more than a grand an hour. That is how much Fabio Capello's personal brand of genius is worth. Is it just me, or is that a lot?
But, you know, at least he does a good job. Oh no, wait, this just in, he doesn't.
I like to think that the professional footballer is a highly specialised, but far less intelligent version of a regular human being. Regular people have little in the way of marketable talent, but are blessed, instead, with free will and ideas. Regular people can make simple decisions and they can do this several times a day. They can do all of this without even breaking sweat. A professional footballer can do none of these things. The simplest of decisions leaves him confused. Stripped of the cloak of humanity that their outward appearance implies, they are like mobile waxwork models, physically correct, but mentally vacant. They need to be corralled at all times, like sheep or horses, so that they don't get lost or eaten, or accidentally erupt in a sudden free thought and ask themselves, "who am I?". Like horses, once broken in and provided with the minimum of training, footballers will slip immediately into their instinctual activity with the merest of prompts. Dress them in the correct attire, shout simple instructions at them and send them out onto the pitch. The manager's work is done. Bark some more brief orders at them should their feeble minds start to wander, provide them with nourishment and fluids after 45min, bark some more, then send them out again to do the same thing in a different direction, and then when it's all over you put them back on the bus (may as well be a horse box) and drive them carefully back to the stable.
Is this really worth £34,000 a day? I know of farmers (and anyone who's ever seem One Man and His Dog will back me up on this) who could achieve the same result for £34,000 a year. It would be an improvement on the wages of an average farmer. What kind of world do we live in where Fabio Capello gets paid more in a day than an average sheep farmer, who's job is essentially the same, gets paid in a year? But it gets worse. Much worse. Fabio Capello is not doing a very good job. What is much, much worse is that he has no idea why. He cannot think of a single thing that he could be doing any better. He is, in effect, acknowledging his own failure while at the same time absolving himself of any responsibility for it. When asked if he will remain as the England manager, he said that the decision lies with his employer. "I'm shit, but it's not up to me is it?" What kind of moral vacuum can sit there, earning £24 a minute, shrugging its shoulders and refusing to take responsibility for the fact that it's failing to achieve in a job that is so simple that people have been managing to do it since the dawn of civilisation and cannot routinely claim an annual wage higher than what this man gets paid in a day? What kind of person, I ask you, can do this? Surely if he was born with even the tiniest shred of personal decency he would, upon taking realisation of his abundant failures, recuse himself of this absurdly well paid job and go wait in the queue at the job centre like everyone else.
You will say, you fans of Fabio Capello, that it is unfair to compare him to a sheep farmer. You will say that he is better than this. So, why not compare him to a fellow football manager? An international manager, of a team that Fabio Capello's England team failed to beat at the last World Cup, the manager of the USA football team, Bob Bradley? Why not? Seems like a fair comparison to me. How much does Bob Bradley get paid in a year? £307,092. No, I haven't forgotten to add a zero or two. Yes, I carried the '1'. That is Bob Bradley's annual salary. It works out at £1228 per day. Still far more than a sheep farmer, but a staggering £32,772 less per day than Fabio Capello. You could, for the price of Capello, have Bob Bradley, who by all accounts is just as good (1:1 last time) as well as 365 sheep farmers. Every year.
To put it differently, you could have Bob Bradley, who is just as good at being a glorified sheep farmer or horse wrangler as Fabio Capello, and still have enough money left over, annually, to buy thirty-five houses (based on the average house price in the UK of £232,628). But let's think about this... That's the average UK house price. What if we wanted to put that money to good use? Wouldn't it be a good idea if instead of spending £8,500,000 a year on a man who freely admits that not only is he a crap at his job, but that he has no idea why that might be, we bought houses for people in the more deprived areas, like a charity might do? The average price of a house in Middlesbrough is only £114,658. So you can get seventy houses a year in Middlesbrough, plus Bob Bradley who, as we have established is just as good as Fabio Capello. Over the course of Fabio Capello's disastrous career as England manager, the people of Middlesbrough could have received as a gift from the F.A., two hundred and eighty houses. 280 houses. Almost three hundred families could have had a new house. A new home. And, the England team of talented animals could have still had Bob Bradley, a perfectly well qualified handler who is just as good as Fabio Capello.
What I'm basically asking here, and I'm sorry if this seems like a stretch, is how can Fabio Capello have the nerve to ask a man, who while not at his physical peak was still not far from being the best footballer in the world, how he wasn't ashamed of being so fat, when he himself makes no apology for being openly terrible at a job for which he gets paid £34,000 a day to do? How can he do both of these things and not implode under the gravity of his own hypocrisy? More to the point, where is the man from the F.A. to come and seek out Fabio Capello, while he's with his family perhaps, or with his friends, and pose to him the same question:
"Are you not ashamed of being so shit?"
